More than being an insider’s confirmation of the power of the pro-Israel lobby over Congress, the former US Senator’s letter also calls into question Noam Chomsky’s increasingly suspect looking motives

“[T]here was just an explosion [in the south tower]. It seemed like on television [when] they blow up these buildings. It seemed like it was going all the way around like a belt, all these explosions.”- Firefighter Richard Banaciski

In Andernach about 50,000 prisoners of all ages were held in an open field surrounded by barbed wire. The men I guarded had no shelter and no blankets; many had no coats. They slept in the mud, wet and cold, with inadequate slit trenches for excrement.

Fact or fantasy? Admiral Richard B. Byrd’s account of his flight over the North Pole and discovery of a “land beyond the poles” is legend. For those still unfamiliar with it we present his classic account and leave you to decide

Holocaust Terminology is the Problem

Introduction — by Peter Myers, August 20, 2014

Thankfully, Left Jews like MJ Rosenberg, Max Blumenthal and Philip Weiss have exposed the Genocidal mentality of the Jewish Right.

But what explains it? How can the Jewish Right advocate Genocide of Palestinians, given the constant media bombardment about the Nazi Holocaust?

The key seems to be in one little word: the word “The”. That little word facilitates a particularist interpretation.

The Jewish Right do not see it having a universal meaning about what people do each other – all people, any people, including themselves, with lessons for us all.

Instead, they mentally file the Nazi Holocaust under the heading “Anti-Semitism” – meaning, the millenia-long persecution of Jews by non-Jews. The lessons are all one-way, the re-education is for non-Jews, by Jews.

Norman Finklestein saw this semantic issue as key to the Holocaust Industry. That’s why he refused to use the term “The Holocaust”, but insisted on bundling the word “Holocaust” with some qualifier – eg “The Nazi Holocaust” – implying one among many.

Yochanan Gordon’s article When Genocide is Permissible has been deleted from the 5 Towns Jewish Times website.

Suddenly, Genocide Is On The Table

The following piece by journalist David Sheen, a Canadian living in Israel since 1999. appears in Religious Dispatches, a blog published by the Annenberg School of Journalism at University of Southern California. I am sending it out because we need to start paying attention to the ugly racism, including calls for genocide, that have been emanating from within the right wing of the Israeli and the American Jewish community. We all hear Jews talking about the hate within segments of the Muslim community directed toward Jews. Too few recognize that our ultras are no different. We just ignore them and pretend they don’t signify anything about us. They do. And now, suddenly, following the revolting Gaza campaign, genocide is actually being discussed, including by a top Israeli official. We can’t ignore this, especially when these threats emanate from the same sector of Jewish and Israeli life that incited the murder of Yitzhak Rabin. These people are our Hamas or maybe our ISIS. We can’t pretend they don’t exist.

*****

Earlier this week the Times of Israel published a post, written by American Yochanan Gordon, titled “When Genocide is Permissible,” which concludes with the following question:

If political leaders and military experts determine that the only way to achieve its goal of sustaining quiet is through genocide is it then permissible to achieve those responsible goals?

Last week, the man gunning for the top spot at the Anti-Defamation League, New York University senior fellow Thane Rosenbaum , authored an op-ed in the Wall StreetJournal legitimizing Israel’s killing of civilians, telling Palestinians in Gaza that, because a plurality of their voting-age population voted for the political wing of Hamas in national elections eight years ago, “you forfeit your right to be called civilians… you have wittingly made yourself targets.”

On Monday, the president of the New York Board of Rabbis, David-Seth Kirshner made this same assertionat a pro-Israel rally of 10,000 people a few blocks from the UN (which had just issued a statement) expressing concern over “the deteriorating situation). In a video posted to Youtube, he is heard saying: “When you are part of an election process that asks for [Hamas]… you are complicit and you are not a civilian casualty.” Kirshner then proclaimed that the Israeli army is “the most moral army in the history of civilization.” […]

For decades, most mainstream Jewish leaders outside of Israel have publicly supported the military adventures of the Israeli government, regardless of the Palestinian death toll. But they have at least paid lip-service to the sanctity of human life and expressed regret for the souls lost on both sides. As Israel’s latest assault on Gaza enters its fourth week, however, we are witnessing a significant rhetorical departure.

Yet as reprehensible as remarks from American Jewish leaders have been, the dehumanizing discourse among political and religious leaders in Israel–where I live and work–has for years been moving toward the grotesque.

The images that have emerged from the Gaza Strip over the past three weeks of Israel’s assault, and the fact that the vast majority of those killed have been Palestinian civilians-including three hundred children–should fill any decent human being with revulsion, regardless of which side they support.

But Israeli leaders have begun to speak openly of their disdain for the lives of Palestinian civilians, damning them to death along with the militants in their midst.

Anti-Arab racist rhetoric is common in Israeli politics. Recent comments by a Member of Knesset and whip of the religious Jewish Home party – key members of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s governing coalition – were especially heinous. In a Facebook post published a month ago, Ayelet Shaked advocated for the killing of “the entire Palestinian people… including its elderly and its women… otherwise, more little snakes will be raised.”

This week Israel’s most popular online news source, Ynetnews, published an op-ed by a rabbi citing Biblical passages as a rationale for extending the bloodshed in Gaza.

In the past month, Rabbi Noam Perel, head of Bnei Akiva, the largest Jewish religious youth group in the world, called for the mass-murder of Palestinians and for their foreskins to be scalped and brought back as trophies, alluding to an episode in the Book of Samuel; and a Jerusalem city councillor, in charge of security, encouraged a crowd to mimic the Biblical character of Phineas (Pinchas in Hebrew), who murdered a fellow Israelite and his Midianite lover for the “crime” of miscegenation:

I am calling out to all the Pinchases that are here … Moses didn’t act, Pinchas acted … every one of us has a mission … The Rebbe, who is here with us, expects us to commit acts of Pinchas.

These blood-curdling statements, while anathema to many, are made with impunity in Israel because there is widespread support-or at least toleration-among the Jewish population. The statements are not confined to religious sectors of society, but are also flourishing on social media platforms, where average Israelis call for Palestinians to be ethnically-cleansed. In the streets of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa, Beersheba, groups of Israeli Jews led by anti-miscegenationist activists marchthrough town chanting “Death to Arabs!” and “Death to leftists!,” assaulting anyone who fits the bill.

Until Israel’s most recent assault on Gaza, Jewish leaders who publicly advocated meting out death to Palestinian civilians were forced to confine their remarks to Hebrew. With Operation Protective Edge, however, a watershed has been breached, with both Israelis and American Jews now permitting themselves to call for the killing of defenseless Palestinians without shame.

Describing this week’s pro-Israel rally at which Rabbi David-Seth Kirshner declared open season on Gazans for voting for Hamas, the Forward’s Hody Nemes wrote:

The pro-Israel rally was organized by UJA-Federation of New York, the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York and other groups, and had the backing of nearly the entire organized Jewish community, including the Reform, Conservative and Orthodox movements. A crowd estimated at close to 10,000 people, including numerous politicians, attended the rally, dwarfing the protests against Israel’s operation.

With the mainstream American Jewish leadership firmly in support of the current military operation there is little pressure for the Israeli government to end the carnage-or for the U.S. government to pressure it to do so.